Latest updates, page 58

I took these pictures while setting out lines for burbot near town. I really am still a fly fishermen, but this is the first liquid water we've had in 7 months, and desperate times call for desperate measures!

Truth be told, I have a dirty little secret... this burbot fishing is kind of fun.

In early May, when fly anglers in the lower 48 are kissing the Hendrickson hatch goodbye and welcoming in the Ephemerella sulphurs, interior Alaska is still in the midst of a season we call "break-up." With temperatures in the 50s and most of the snow gone at our altitude, it's no longer winter in Fairbanks. But it's not spring yet, either. The trees show no sign of green. The rivers, swollen with mountain snowmelt, are still choked with massive chunks of their meter-thick winter ice, crashing through the riffles and sharp bends in a thunderous racket as the river carries them down toward the Yukon and the Bering Sea.

If you think this does not sound like dry fly weather, you're right.

The first good fishing of the year is less delicate: it involves heavy spinning gear, ounces of lead, size 2/0 hooks, and dead, cut fish. The reward is the burbot, the world's only freshwater cod, a fish more delicious than its saltwater counterparts. I'm happy to catch burbot at any time of year, but they're especially sweet after 7 months of winter!

I've just finished moving Troutnut.com over to different servers where it should run faster, changing a few little graphics, and setting the width to take advantage of wider screens. The site looks best in either Internet Explorer 9 or a good browser like Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 and 8 should work, but you won't see everything just right.

And I'm making one really big change: opening up the main site to other contributors! I'm just too busy finishing my Ph.D. to do much of anything here, and some excellent photographers and writers have volunteered to help out. I won't turn the site into a free-for-all, but these hand-picked contributors you'll be meeting soon have as much to add to it as I do. If you're interested in becoming one--which means having all your work featured here on the front page and throughout the site--then email me some try-out photos at jason@troutnut.com and tell me about yourself. I'm especially looking for help adding western insects and river pictures to the site, since I haven't been lucky enough to fish and photograph that region yet myself (Alaska excluded).

In some other small but noteworthy changes, we've taken some of the information that was already on the site, but hidden or poorly organized, and made it available to everyone. These include:

• I've changed the front page of the site into a blog that features the latest site updates and (like this, and more in the future) conventional blog posts.
  
• I've added a Trout Streams & Rivers section to the menu, where you can browse all the pictures on this site by location, except for pictures of big trout in places where the big trout might be somewhat secret. Of course, I had to all-out censor a few locations -- some of my "Mystery Creeks" are too delicate to reveal, as they're the kinds of places where seeing someone else's week-old footstep makes you feel crowded.
  
• There's a "scientific name search" box in the top left, where you can instantly jump to an insect's page if you know its scientific name. It's the fastest way to get around the insect encyclopedia.
  

There are some tweaks to the forum, too! Check it out.